Out Of The Storm

On Halloween 1517, when Martin Luther nailed to the door of Wittenberg s Castle Church his 95 Theses in protest at papal indulgences he also nailed , in another sense, the concept of Western Christendom which had been a fundamental political given since the time of Charlemagne. It is one of the ironies of history that at the very moment when Charles V came to rule over a European empire which was, for the first time, as large as that controlled by his great namesake, a young Saxon monk irrevocably shattered its very raison d etre. uther s solitary stand against the pope and the Holy Roman Emperor at the Diet of Worms in 1521 and his magnificent German translation of the Bible in the 1530s secured his place in history as one of the greatest religious thinkers of all time. His vast oeuvre (over 70 volumes) sprang from one idea that believers are saved by faith alone and not works and incited the world s biggest evangelical revival, provoking the rethinking of deep-seated ideas about Church and State, government and the individual, war and peace. ut was Luther a humanitarian and champion of individual freedom or was he a defender of state tyranny who sparked a century of rel